Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has warned users of Red Hat Linux that they will have to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us," Ballmer said last week at a company event in London discussing online services in the UK.

Everyone who has regarded the deals between MS and Novell/Linspire/Xandros as some kind of friendly gesture from MS towards OSS was dead wrong. MS has always had a very ugly face - sometimes they were able to hide it, but it's now visible again. And it is indeed very, very ugly.